#i think the island is either

[bestworstcase]

Do you think The God of Animals from the RWBY fairytails The Shallow Sea and The Judgement of the Fanus might be another powerful Afterian who decided to go through the door? Because looking at the stories I'm not sure, but the creation of Fanus in the stories does actually seem to be pretty similar to ascension so I feel like there was influence from it. Maybe someone brought a bunch of Tree leaves to Remnant and the tea or smoke made from it turned people or animals into faunus.

genuinely i think the god of animals—as in the inspiration for the mythical entity, i don’t think there is an actual ‘god of animals’ in the way that the brothers are real—Is Salem.

one of the faunus creation myths is about outcasts with nowhere else to go and nothing to lose choosing to jump into magical waters offered to them by a capricious, wild god, and emerging transformed and liberated from their unhappy fates only to be condemned by humans who perceive their changes as horrific. the other is about being transformed by the judgment of a god into beings who are then immediately blamed for leading grimm to a human settlement and exiled forever.

salem is “your grace” to some of her followers, particularly tyrian, and this is also the form of address used for ghira belladonna—she is literally addressed by her own followers in the form of a faunus monarch! there is a cultural adjacency to faunus baked into referring to her this way!

the world of remnant episodes on grimm and faunus imply HEAVILY that 1. faunus have historically been viewed by humans as adjacent to grimm and 2. there is a strong cultural perception that grimm are an existential threat to humans specifically, with faunus being at best an afterthought. and of course adam’s white fang carted grimm around no problem and menagerie just…doesn’t seem to have a grimm problem, so it’s entirely possible that grimm really don’t prey on faunus except incidentally.

in ‘after the fall’ as in V2 ozpin singles out The Faunus Member Of The Team for questioning after an incident, and while we don’t get to see it directly with velvet she is in tears when her teammates burst in, and of course with blake it is transparently obvious that ozpin suspects blake of being salem’s spy; it probably also bears repeating that back in the day ozma factored “the people telling me scary stories about The Witch who lives among Beasts and Monsters also enslave faunus and keep them in cages” into his assessment of these stories not at all, and doesn’t seem to have been all that fussed about the cages situation itself. the man is quietly racist but also, like, “beasts” in this context is a euphemism for faunus, we’ve all grokked this, yeah?

all of which is to say, there are a lot of small hints as to a cultural Connection between salem and faunus that together add up to, well, i think at one point she was similarly influential to the development of faunus myth as ozma was to that of human folklore, if probably not with the same degree of intentionality. like ‘the shallow sea’ is an allegorical retelling of salem’s plunge into the grimm pool told from the perspective of freely chosen transformation being a good thing. also the god of animals is said to be a shapeshifter and we know that shapeshifting is something magic users can do. also ‘the shallow sea’ Specifically brings up the grimm three separate times just to say “don’t worry about them, they’re not a problem in This story” which, Okay.